WHAT IS CARDINAL?

The Conrad Blucher Institute for surveying and Science (CBI) is excited to announce a fresh, new service to the land surveying community, starting spring 2018, that will aide your surveying practice in managing their firms with ease. Cardinal is a web based solution to survey management solution that gets you off the phone and back to surveying. By using Cardinal, not only will your surveying practice receive a professional survey management solution designed to fit your practice, it will also provide your clients with a way to monitor job progression, receive and pay invoices, and receive deliverables.  

WHO CAN USE CARDINAL?

Cardinal was designed to be a flexible solution to survey office management for companies of all sizes. We’ve focused on developing an easy to adapt service that allows you to incorporate the roles, steps, and tasks of your practice into our software. When Cardinal is set up for your practice, we will incorporate specifications about how you operate each office so that your Cardinal solution includes tailored features such as: company organization (ex. principal, project manager, crew chief), stages of each job (ex. research, field work, plat & stamp, bill client), job tasks, task pricing, and even incorporating parcel data into Cardinal’s web map. We’ve built Cardinal from the ground-up to be flexible and familiar to encourage quick adoption by both you and your clients.

WHY DO YOU WANT CARDINAL?

Communication between surveyors and clients is the most common formal complaint made to the Texas Board of Professional Land Surveyors. In 2017 alone, Cardinal could have prevented 57% of the formal complaints made to the Board. By providing solutions to issues like communication, payments, and expected deliverables, Cardinal lets you focus on what you love; surveying. Cardinal also helps you reduce overhead costs of office management. Our service can reduce 120 man-hours of office labor to 20 man-hours of office labor, giving your practice the power of big business office departments without the need for numerous staff personnel. Your control of your firm is essential to us at Conrad Blucher Institute as we prioritize empowering and growing the surveying community within our mission.

HOW CAN STAFF AND CLIENTS USE CARDINAL?

Cardinal has two entry portals: one for clients, and one for staff.

The client portal allows clients to view and pay their invoices and download job deliverables. If the clients wish to pay with a credit card, then they may do so online, however, if they wish to pay with cash or check, then staff can mark the payment received in Cardinal. Regardless of payment method, once the invoice has been paid in full, clients are able to download the deliverable for the job directly from the client portal. The number of days that the deliverable is available to the client after payment can be set by the company.

The staff portal provides a tailored view of the company’s projects from inception to billing. When staff log in to Cardinal, they are greeted with the overview page that displays all jobs assigned to them and/or managed by them, what stage each job is in, and where those jobs are located on a map. Sections of Cardinal can be restricted based on roles within the company, so, for example, field crew can be restricted from viewing financial information and modifying client information, but can view the details of jobs assigned to them and mark the status of their assigned jobs.

CONRAD BLUCHER INSTITUTE

The Conrad Blucher Institute for Surveying and Science at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi is committed to serving the surveying and geospatial communities through the offering of innovation, affordable solutions and high quality students to ensure success for our field.

A portion of all proceeds go towards funding surveying and geospatial student education.

Learn more about Cardinal and how to get involved at cardinal.tamucc.edu. Your questions and feedback are appreciated. Please contact us via email at cardinal@tamucc.edu or call at (361) 825-3226.